Green Seed Fund 2014 Approved Projects

The Green Seed Fund awards grants to UW faculty, students, and staff to research opportunities that advance sustainable research while contributing to campus sustainability goals. Listed below are the projects awarded funding during 2014.

A committee comprised of students, faculty and staff reviewed fifteen proposals totaling over $975,000 and awarded five proposals nearly $279,000 in funding. The projects were selected because the review committee felt that they will contribute to UW sustainability goals, are research focused, the project scope seems well thought out and achievable, the project has a broad reach, and will contribute to greenhouse gas reductions for the University.

The purpose of this project is to develop and pilot a building use audit tool that will measure physical characteristics of UW building use. The tool will measure the cultural context of a building such as lighting and energy use, density and use of equipment plug loads, frequency of window use, and frequency of occupant use of building and schedules. The consideration of cultural context will be important as the buildings on UW campus house many different departments and functions with each having a different impact of energy consumption on campus.

The goal of this project is to facilitate the adoption of the UW Green Labs Certification program for the UW Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences laboratories. The group will work to find a better understanding of barriers, to score higher on the Green Labs certification and finding better guidelines for low-scoring parts of the application. The project will identify the best green practices for labs, where implementation will have the greatest impact, and serve as a template for other laboratories.

The project, focused on UW’s Botanic Garden’s Washington Park Arboretum, will compare the utility performance of the two different fuel sourced vehicles used at this facility: diesel and electric. The project will gather data that will inform grounds purchasing decisions for vehicles that are strong enough for grounds work and do not contribute to the university’s greenhouse gas emissions.

This project seeks to investigate the indoor environmental quality of the Husky Union Building. The group will measure temperature, air speed, acoustics, lighting, water consumption, and quality of indoor comfort through building occupant surveys. They will measure the building using instruments provided by the HUB and distinguish the quality of energy and utility consumption, if efficiency problems exist, and whether the same analysis can be used on other UW campus buildings.

The UW Green Wall and Water Harvesting Systems was installed in the fall of 2012 to help reduce building energy needs, conserve potable water, reduce storm water pollution, and increase biodiversity. Now the project will be analyzed to measure exterior and interior temperature, its support of bird and insect use, stormwater management and water conservation potential, and its contribution to plant diversity in an urban environment. The results of analyzing the wall will go towards maximizing these benefits and implementing them in future projects on campus.